Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, apparatus, and products for alert management.
Description of Related Art
The development of the EDVAC computer system of 1948 is often cited as the beginning of the computer era. Since that time, computer systems have evolved into extremely complicated devices. Today's computers are much more sophisticated than early systems such as the EDVAC. Computer systems typically include a combination of hardware and software components, application programs, operating systems, processors, buses, memory, input/output devices, and so on. As advances in semiconductor processing and computer architecture push the performance of the computer higher and higher, more sophisticated computer software has evolved to take advantage of the higher performance of the hardware, resulting in computer systems today that are much more powerful than just a few years ago.
Computer systems today are often coupled with many other computer systems through a data communications network. In some environments, many computer systems, components of the computer systems, or components of a data center, may be monitored for potential remedial action. In such an environment, many disparate sources may send events or potential alerts to a single monitoring agent which may also be coupled, upstream, to a ticket queuing agent. The monitoring agent may receive alerts from the monitored systems and pass along the alerts to the ticket queuing agent. The ticket queuing agent may generate and issue a ticket describing a particular issue which is to be addressed by a system administrator. In some instances, however, alerts provided to the monitoring agent may not include an identifier or the monitoring agent may be unable to utilize the provided identifier. In such cases today, the monitoring agent passes the alert along to the ticket queuing system where the ticket queuing agent utilizes a static lookup table to identify the alert and process the alert. Such processing though takes place far upstream from the source and also utilizes a static lookup table. Such a static lookup table is somewhat inflexible and resource intensive. What is needed therefore is means by which alerts having no identifier or an unusable identifier may be processed closer to the source and without utilization of a static lookup table at the ticket queuing system.